Tealeaf has spent the last nine years working with hundreds of organizations to help them take a more systematic, quantifiable approach to improving online customer experience. In the process, we have developed a set of best practices which provides a way for customer-centric companies to utilize their web site optimization tools to create visibility, to gain insights about customer behavior, and most importantly, to find the right answers that enable them to provide more value to customers.
I Have So Many Sessions! Where Do I Start?
This may be the most common question we are asked. When ebusiness leaders begin to think about implementing online customer experience optimization initiatives, many of them are overwhelmed by the thought of having thousands if not millions of individual customer sessions to review. However, just because you can't look at all of your customers' sessions — or everyone who abandoned a shopping cart — doesn't mean that you shouldn't look at any sessions! Call center managers have long known the value of listening in on a sample of calls, and retailers regularly observe shoppers in the store. Our best practices will help you to know which online customer sessions you should be looking at — which ones are most likely to give you the best insight that will lead to the biggest improvements in customer experience.
Phase I – Visibility
These best practices explain how to move from awareness of a customer experience issue to understanding which online customer sessions to review in order to get to the root cause. To succeed, it's about setting up the right processes, systems and even mindset to make sure that you are proactively observing customer experience issues through:
- Systematic customer listening initiatives: these can range from online surveys to customer feedback from your contact center
- Proactive, scheduled customer experience reviews: reviewing the online experiences of your actual customers is similar to listening in on a sampling of calls in your call center
- Ongoing optimization of web site metrics: whether based on metrics on customers experience such as a overall usability metric or metrics on overall business health, such as conversion rates
- Regular application health monitoring: tracking system and application issues such as performance and error message in terms of how they are impacting your actual customers
Phase II – Insight
These best practices explain how to use Tealeaf to perform what is cornerstone — customer behavior analysis. Using real-world examples from Tealeaf customers, these best practices describe how to take a deep look at each customer experience issue until you understand both the business impact of the issue and its root cause. It includes:
- Business impact quantification: Tealeaf provides you the quantitative data necessary to understand the business impact of customer experience issues so you can prioritize site enhancements accordingly.
- Advanced customer behavior analysis: Tealeaf's free-text search and customer behavior analysis capabilities take you past just knowing there is a problem to understanding exactly what that problem is.
Phase III – Answers
These best practices discuss how to use the insights gleaned from Tealeaf to implement changes that deliver real improvements to your online customer experience, including:
- Fix the problems identified during the Insight phase to optimize customer experience;
- Follow up with affected customers to either prevent defection or recover lost sales; and,
- Take steps to proactively identify the same or similar problems going forward.
Getting Started
The collective experience of Tealeaf customers has shown that the best approach is a phased one, which is why we advocate a maturity model that makes it easy to incorporate these best practices into your business. The four phases of the maturity model are:
- Reactive Problem Resolution
- Active Alerting and Issue Monitoring
- Proactive Discovery and Analysis
- Customer Experience Optimization
The majority of Tealeaf's customers have been able to move from the first phase into the last phase very quickly. And in fact, virtually all of our customers have reported recouping their investment in Tealeaf in the first phase — reactive problem resolution — alone. As companies progress through each of these levels of maturity, they establish an increasingly disciplined approach to online customer experience optimization. The end result is more satisfied online customers who abandon fewer transactions, spend more with your business, and remain loyal over time.
